Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Yes, Jen?”

I want to be with you when you go on in.

Leslie Tjakamarra dreamed of flying, and he dreamed of being bitten to death by ants. Not separately, by turns, but both at once, in a timeless conflation of then and now and when that blurred into an unceasing whole. He dreamed of the wave that rolls across the water, but cannot change the water, and he dreamed he was rocked in the womb of the mother, wrapped in the coils of the rainbow snake. He dreamed he was dying, and the sun bleached his bones, both at once. All at once.

All right now.

Leslie Tjakamarra had a starship dreaming, and he had joked that it was just as well that he had no taste for starship, as his kinship with them precluded his killing and eating one. He had a starship dreaming, and all things that were had been sung already, were just waiting under the ground for their time to come. Alive in the Dreaming before they were alive in the world.

He had a starship dreaming, and here he was, drifting in space, blind and deaf, warm enough that he knew his heaters hadn't broken, cool enough that he knew he hadn't been knocked into sunlight with his radiators failing. He wasn't sure if the blow had caused his faceplate to opaque, or if it was simply too dark to see, or if he had been blinded. His inner ear told him he was floating rather than spinning, and while he couldn't move his arms or legs, pins and needles told him he hadn't been paralyzed. He might have a moment's air left, or an hour's, or a day's; however much it was, it was a lifetime's worth.

Time passed and the tingling in his fingertips receded, leaving cold numbness. He could imagine, if he thought about it very hard, that he felt a squishy colloid between his fingers, a texture that resembled mud mixed with cold Vaseline. The chill crept upward, numbing his palms, making his wrists and the bones of his hands ache before the sensation left them.

This is going to be a long, chilly way to die, Leslie thought, and tried to relax into it, to relax into the dream and the dying.

He had a starship dreaming, and now it began to seem that he had become a small, peculiar sort of starship of his own.

Even for an AI, there was a fine art to doing everything at once, and Richard was stretching his limits faster than they could grow. If you were a certain kind of person, it was a universal constant that demands expanded slightly in advance of resources. Richard was forming the opinion that, in his case, the pigheadedness of the universe amounted to malice aforethought.

Most of his — and Alan's — awareness was spread in a thin web of nanosurgeons flitting through the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In particular, he was tracking the rapidly evolving shifts in the damaged ocean's unstable currents, still hard at work on the incredibly complex calculations required to enact the solution suggested by Jen's offhand comment regarding the Aegean Stables and the diversion of rivers.

To wit: What if the climatic damage could be ameliorated by re-creating — by healing —the Atlantic thermohaline deep-water turnover process, using mechanical means to redistribute saline? What if Richard could reverse some of that damage, buffer both the current global cooling and the looming catastrophic warming trend, and stabilize the climate? It could save millions of lives, if he could attain a sufficient understanding of the process. He might be able to re-create the warming processes of the defunct Gulf Stream and the so-called great ocean conveyor belt, the saltwater-density-driven worldwide ocean current that had helped keep northern Europe unfrozen for thousands of years, and which no longer existed. If he got it right, the British Isles might even be salvageable, although the process of moving the evacuees back was logistically daunting.

Or, if he understood the process incorrectly, and pulled the wrong string in his meddling, he could provoke an ecological meltdown to make the current crisis seem like a glitch. He finished checking Alan's climatological analysis and handed the body of the data back to the other personality thread with corrections and suggestions. Alan replied with a string of information regarding Leslie and Charlie's quandary; being less emotionally involved, Alan had honed Richard's hopeful numbers and reworked his code to something more aggressive.

An attempt to free the captured men could possibly outrage the aliens — could be seen as an act of war, could provoke them into violent action against the Montreal, or against the Earth. Of course, doing nothing might provoke them just as easily. He mentioned that to Elspeth over the speaker in her office, and Elspeth nodded and tapped her thumbnail against her teeth and said, “You know what occurs to me, Dick?” in that slow, thoughtful way she sometimes had.

Richard reached out to the nanites in contact with the two scientists, who he hoped very profoundly were unconscious, marshalled his forces, and paused. He couldn't control the Benefactor bugs, but he could feel them, coating two intact space suits, the outlines clear as the shape of a hand pressed into a pin box. There was no reason for the suits not to be functional.

“Elspeth, if I could read your mind, people would have good reason to be far more scared of me than they are.”

“Hah. Well, they haven't taken any drastic action before now, have they?”

“Nothing aggressive. Nothing at all, really.”

“Until we moved onto their turf.”

“And they slapped us back.”

“Unless,” Elspeth said, “they were inviting us in.”

Richard paused for mere fragments of a second, considering. “You make a good point,” he agreed. “We can't know at all what they expect. They could expect us to come back and continue the conversation, and be hurt — offended — when we don't.”

“Exactly.”

“Except we have another problem,” he said, as a new pattern of movement in the nanotech layer drew his attention. “I think they're taking the space suits apart.”

“Dick? Can you do something?”

“I'm on it, Elspeth.” And he was. Moving, his improvised— the phrase you're avoiding is “slapped together,” Dick —code compiled and ready, a best-guess and nothing he would have wanted to stake his own life on, let alone anyone else's. “Look, can you get Jeremy up there? I need the two of you to distract somebody.”

It's always easier to get forgiveness than permission, he told himself, and woke up Jenny and Min-xue.

The magnitude of the problem was evident when Valens walked into the prime minister's office. He read it in the set of her shoulders as she stood leaning against the wall and how her hands coiled around the mug she held like a shield before her chest.

“Are we going to war?” Perhaps not the most politic question, but Valens's relationship with Riel had come to be characterized by a certain bluntness.

“Not with the Chinese,” she said. “The Benefactors may be another matter. They've captured two of the researchers.”

Valens's heart dropped into his belly, even though he knew Patty hadn't been on the EVA team. “Who?”

“Forster and Tjakamarra.”

“Damn. Charlie…” And then he paused. “Captured?”

“That's what Richard and Alan think.”

“It occurs to me, Prime Minister,” he said, and crossed the room to the decanter three-quarters full of Scotch, “that we're becoming entirely too dependent on ‘Richard-and-Alan-say.'”

“That hasn't escaped my notice either, General.” Riel's voice was dry, bittersweet. He didn't turn to see her expression; he could picture it well enough. The decanter was heavy, crystal cut in a crosshatched pattern cool and rough under his fingers. He filled a tumbler, two fingers, as she continued. “You were about to comment on the capture of two of our leading scientists, unless I misread you.”